Worlds in Dream
by Andi Horton
Summary: Far from home on the fields of France, Bill Pevensie dreams of his wife, his children, and worlds he's never seen.
1. The Known Place

Worlds in Dream 

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The Known Place

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The war had started out simply enough for Bill Pevensie. He hadn't been among the first of the eager young fellows who flocked to enlist, but he'd been among the second tide of them; no longer a rash young boy, he was a man with a family, and he'd needed to think the thing through before he went ahead with it. He hadn't been proud of it, exactly, but he'd felt it the right thing, and Maura had backed him staunchly, as Maura usually did.

"You do what you think best," she had said quietly, when he had first raised the subject, "and you know I'll be behind you all the way."

The next morning he had gone out directly after breakfast, and got in the queue at the recruitment office. When he returned home and his children crowded round him, wide-eyed, staring at their father in his strange new uniform, he had managed to pretend that he was doing nothing more or less than a bit of travelling. He would be back as soon as he could, he reassured them all, and then they would be able to talk about the things the little family had done while he was away.

"Will you tell us all about what _you've_ done, too?" Lucy had asked, one little finger timidly tracing a shining brass button on her father's coat. Bill had kissed his daughter's nose, and changed the subject. Not a week later, he'd been on his way to France.

In France, things didn't stop being simple, but they were the worst sort of simple imaginable. There was mud, and there were guns, and there were men who lived and men who died. There was nothing else. It was the ugliest sort of simple he had ever seen.

The only time things got a bit better was at night. At night, he was far away from everything that had happened in the day, for at night, he dreamed of home. He didn't flatter himself that he was unique in that respect; he rather thought most of the men around him were doing much the same. But there was something about his dreams —something strange, something different— that made him feel he might not be in quite the same boat as the others.

They had certainly started ordinary enough; the usual things, the nightmares, the thought of losing everybody. He lost count of the times he imagined he had come home only to find them all dead, Maura stretched over their children, trying to the last to keep them all safe. He sometimes dreamed he was back with them, too; the four little ones crowding round him, not so little anymore, their faces alight as they bubbled over with news of their still-childish adventures, of the games they'd made in the garden, or the secrets they were bursting to share with him. These dreams were the first of the lot, and these were mere supposals; they were nothing more than snatches, glimpses of memory blurring into might-be, the way ordinary dreams are. There was truth in them but there was fiction too, and it was all as normal as could be.

It was about a week after he arrived in France that they began to change.

"_Swing me, Daddy, swing me! Swing me up to the sky!" Lucy demanded, and with a laugh he lifted her effortlessly over his head, twirling her around until Maura, half reproachful, half laughing, had told them to go wash up for supper._

"_More later, darling, all right, then?" he had smiled at his disappointed daughter, his hand carefully, clumsily smoothing the fair, tousled curls. "There, now, don't pout so! There are plenty more where that came from, I promise."_

That one was the first of them; the first of the dreams that had actually happened. The first of the real memories.

"_Am I doing it right?" Edmund hunched over, his brow furrowed in concentration as his father oversaw the wielding of a knife. A small, wooden boat was taking shape under the careful strokes of the gleaming blade._

"_That's it, Son; not so much force. Don't push it, or you'll lose control; just guide it, and . . . there, you go," as a smooth, pale pine curl spiralled down from the dainty craft._

_Lucy had professed herself delighted with the toy, and had sailed it in her bath every Saturday night until at last the unvarnished wood became so waterlogged it simply sank, and refused to float again._

It went on that way for some time, each of the dreams something solid; something real. Each dream was something that had already happened, and it felt, as he dreamed each one, that they were happening all over again.

"_Susan, darling, it's lovely. Isn't it beautiful, Bill?"_

"_It's a fine piece of work; you made it yourself, pet?" he asked, handling the tobacco pouch with care. Susan, blushing, flustered and pleased with the praise, as she always was, said that she had._

"_Happy birthday, Dad," she murmured, kissing his cheek, and Bill knew better than to spend too long exclaiming over the embroidered leather pouch; Susan embarrassed so easily._

They were only dreams, he knew, but at the same time they were so much more. They were memories. They were things that had happened to him. They were a window into the life that seemed a world away, the world and family that too often seemed to belong to another lifetime. They had been something to look forward to at the end of the day; they were the only good thing he had left to him. Men were dying all around, but at night, as he slept, he could see them still.

"_Dad . . ." Peter, pale and solemn, trying to be grown up about it but looking so very much a little boy. "Do . . . do you know how long you'll be gone?"_

_Bill and Maura Pevensie didn't lie to their children. "I don't, Son."_

_Peter nodded, just once, and drew a quick, sharp breath. "All right," he said quietly, and that was it. Bill, knowing that a hug would likely break them both, instead rested one firm hand on his boy's shoulder._

"_Look after your mother, Peter," he urged quietly. "She'll be strong for the four of you, but . . . she'll need somebody to be strong for her, too. Can you do that?"_

_And Peter, his chest suddenly expanding with the warmth of responsibility —Peter had always done best when he'd had things expected of him— had vowed that he would. Not once did Bill doubt it was a promise the boy would keep._

The dreams hadn't come in order at first; certainly not in any sort of chronological fashion. They were mixed-up glimpses of the life he had left behind, the recent often preceding the distant past. One night Edmund had shown up, skinning his knee and wrenching his ankle after he had fallen out of the rotten old apple tree at the foot of the garden. The next, Maura had been a bride of seventeen, her eyes wide and cheeks unnaturally pale as she and her husband faced each other at the front of the church.

_Wisps of hair had escaped the knot at the nape of her neck, curling about her face, softening it. He nearly reached out and brushed them off her brow from sheer habit, but with an effort he held back. The strain was telling on them both; his hands were cold, his mouth dry, and Maura's delicate features were writ with uncertainty. Her tiny chin firmed when she saw he was watching her —so stubborn, that was one of the things he loved best about her— but her eyes, green and clear and normally so bright, so unabashedly Maura, remained wide and shadowed with apprehension throughout the ceremony. _

"_William Richard Pevensie," the vicar intoned, in a voice so thin and reedy they'd had to strain to hear him at all, "will you have Maura Elizabeth Hughes as your wife, to live together, as God has ordained, in the holy state of matrimony? Will you love her, cherish her, honour and protect her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her, as long as you both shall live?"_

_God alone knew how he'd made his mouth form the words. His throat had been painfully parched, and he knew he must look twice as scared as she. But he looked into her eyes, and he drew courage from the fear they shared. They were so young; he knew they were young. He knew they might even be too young to do such a grown-up thing. But he also knew he loved her more than anything. He knew if he didn't have her for his own, he would regret it for the rest of his life._

_They would make this work._

"_I will."_

His pillow and cheek had been damp the next morning.

It was shortly after that night that the dreams began to change again. They retained the same vivid feel, as if he were there, looking on, but he was no longer a part of them. He was an observer only.

"_She can't mean it; Peter, she can't." Susan, almost as pale as Maura had been on their wedding day, crept into the boys' room late one afternoon. Edmund wasn't there; only Peter, sitting on his bed and looking almost as strained as she. "Please, tell me she won't do this."_

"_She'll do as she thinks best, Su," Peter shifted, looking uncomfortable. "I know it seems like some great, terrible thing, but–"_

"_But nothing! There aren't any buts about this!" Susan looked as close to wild as she ever had. "Peter, she's sending us away! First Daddy left, and now Mum's sending us off, too. To the country! To stay in some place with some horrid people we've never met, people we don't even know . . . What sort of family can we possibly be if we're scattered all over the place?"_

_Bill had never seen his son look so scared or alone, but in the face of his sister's distress, Peter would not give way._

"_The very best sort we can," he said quietly, and without further preamble he pulled Susan to him, and let her cry._

He had wondered a bit about it the next morning, dreaming about things that hadn't happened, and what it meant and all that, but a war doesn't let you wonder things for long. Before an hour had passed he had forgotten it, and it stayed forgotten until two nights later, when the next one came.

"_Margaret says there isn't going to be any tea today," Edmund stomped through a door Bill didn't recognise, into a room he had never seen before. It was long and low, with four large windows and sensible furnishings. It looked a very good, safe sort of room for children. "Betty couldn't get any sugar at the shops, nor any tea; she got there too late, and it was all gone."_

"_It's this wretched rationing," Peter decided, but his sister was not so charitable._

"_It's not the rationing, it's Betty; they shouldn't send her to run the errands," Susan said primly, looking up from the book she held on her lap. "Betty's so distractible, she's late for everything. Naturally everything was gone by the time she got there, she dawdles so."_

"_Oh, come off it," Edmund's scowl deepened. "You're only saying that because you heard Mrs Macready saying so."_

"_Well," Susan sounded, if possible, even more prim than before, "she does. She's terribly slow. Whenever Betty waits at table, we sit there for ages. The Professor fell asleep last night just waiting for her to bring out the pudding!"_

"_He didn't," Edmund said, purely for the sake of being contrary. Lucy, who was plopped down in a chair so large that her little feet barely reached halfway to the floor, squirmed into a posture as upright as she could manage in order to protest._

"_He did! I heard him snore!"_

"_Yes, well, you've been seeing lots of things that aren't there, haven't you?" Edmund jeered. "So who's to say you haven't been hearing things, too?" And with that he stomped from the room again, so he missed seeing Lucy's little face crumple pitifully as two big, fat tears squeezed out from the corners of her eyes._

"_I'll go have a word with him," Peter said grimly. He got to his feet and went after his brother, leaving the two girls alone in the room. Lucy was still crying._

"_Oh, now, Lucy, really," Susan sighed, setting aside her book and going to cuddle the smaller girl to her, "you mustn't take it to heart like this. You know he's only doing it to upset you."_

"_I know," Lucy sobbed, "and it works." And she pressed her little face to Susan's blouse, and wept for a good long time._

Bill awoke from that particular experience with a jolt. It was the most unique dream he'd ever had, as vivid as a film but set in a place he had never seen, and he wasn't sure what to think of it. He might even have spent some time mulling it over, but the morning after he dreamed it they went over the top, and lost over half their company on the field before noon. They then spent the rest of the day in bone-breaking, muddy retreat, and he had collapsed onto his bedroll that night a shaken, wretched remnant of a man, feeling less than a shadow of the one he had once been. Dreaming had been the farthest thing from his mind.

Thinking about dreams, however, is not only way to have them; not ordinary dreams, nor even the strange, confusing sort of dreams he was beginning to have now. So it should come as no wonder to anyone to hear that on that night, not quite two weeks after the dreams first began, Bill Pevensie dreamed about his four children again, and they were the strangest, most confusing and enchanting dreams he'd had yet.

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** Not sure exactly how many parts this will have to it; it's just something that sort of occurred to me, and as it was a good way to put off starting in on the longer fic I'm plotting, I thought I'd see what I could make of it! This won't be anything too terribly long, but I'd say there'll be at least three parts left to come, possibly four. Time will tell!

Up next: The New Place.


	2. The New Place

The New Place

O0O0O0O

The night Bill Pevensie dreamed of the new place would be one he remembered for the rest of his life. Nothing about the place would allow him to forget it; nothing he had ever seen or dreamed before looked or felt like that place, and the moment he saw it, he felt it become a part of him. For the rest of his life, wherever he went, he would always be able to close his eyes and see it in his mind's eye, just as clear and sharp as if he was seeing it for the first time all over again. Strangest of all, the moment he saw it, he knew it would be so; he knew it would become an indelible part of him. Whether that was good or bad he could not immediately decide, but he knew for a fact that he would never forget it.

It began in a wood. There was snow all about, and the place looked like nothing so much as a picture on a Christmas card. A single lamp-post stood in the midst of a small clearing, its flame giving a steady, reassuring light. The gentle glow wasn't as harsh as that of electric lamps, and if Bill had been just a little older than he was, it might have reminded him of his childhood. As it was, he almost thought he could hear it hissing softly as the flame sucked greedily at the gas, but before he could move any closer to inspect it . . . there she was. His Lucy.

The little girl's eyes were bright with curiosity as she stepped cautiously through the snow, turning her head this way and that, reaching out once or twice to brush her little fingers through a drift or bat at a laden fir bough, shivering with both cold and delight. Her sturdy little shoes left small, deep prints in the snow behind her, and looking beyond his daughter, Bill could just make out a glimmer of daylight. It should perhaps have struck him odd, that there should be daylight beyond a thicket of trees when he and his daughter stood in a wood at night, but that's the way of dreams, after all; you don't think of the things you should.

Now, Bill was only thinking how grown up Lucy looked from when he had seen her last, and yet how very like a little girl she still was. Snowflakes dusted her fair hair, and her whole face was lit up like Christmas morning. She took a little, skipping step once or twice, and he thought he could hear her humming to herself. She was, he saw, walking toward the lamp-post, and when she saw it, she stopped, and studied it with nothing more than innocent appreciation. If there was any perplexity on her face, it was lost to his view, bathed as she was in the soft, golden glow of light.

Even now, with his daughter standing almost within arm's reach, it did not occur to Bill to try to speak to Lucy; even though he had not seen her so long, and missed her so dearly, it was quite clear to him as he stood there that it was not for him to speak to her. It was knowledge to him the way knowledge always is in dreams; a fellow just knows a thing, and doesn't waste time asking himself how he came to know it in the first place. Still, I don't know for sure that he wouldn't have tried it, had something else not happened first.

Lucy saw the creature before he did; saw, or perhaps heard it. Bill, for his part, saw the change in her face before he saw the reason for it; by the time he turned to follow her gaze of intense curiosity, the funny little goat-fellow had already spotted them —or had, perhaps, only spotted Lucy, as it was at Lucy that he looked— and, with a little cry, dropped the parcels that he had been holding.

It was a sight Bill had seen countless times in London at Christmas time; a nice, inoffensive fellow, carrying home a few parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, bumps into another fellow, or is bumped into by a crowd of children, or simply loses his footing a moment on the slippery ground, and the parcels go scattering down. It had even happed to him, once. If they had been in London, he might even have urged Lucy to help collect the fallen parcels, but here the little creature —a Faun, wasn't that what those little goaty things were? He had seen them in his storybooks as a child, surely— did the gathering on his own before addressing himself to Lucy.

Bill watched the exchange with deep fascination. It was exactly the sort of thing that you might imagine dreaming yourself; seeing a person you knew, engaged in perfectly rational conversation with a thing you knew for a fact couldn't exist. And of course you didn't question it, because that's how dreams are, after all, isn't it? But something changed for Bill when the Faun —Mr Tumnus, according to the Faun himself— invited Lucy to take tea with him.

I don't know what it was that upset him about this; I don't believe even Bill knew. But when the invitation was extended, and when Lucy's protests were overruled, something like a large, silent bell began clanging in her father's head. It might have been a dream. It might have been a complete figment of his imagination, that he would laugh at when he woke . . . he didn't know. He really didn't care. All that he knew was that Lucy must not go with Mr Tumnus, because little girls don't go take tea with perfect strangers, even if they _are_ make-believe strangers. It's not what parents bring their children up to do, and to see Lucy about to do it . . .

Bill started forward. He didn't walk, exactly— he wasn't sure what he did. He moved forward, but he didn't hear the snow crunching under his feet, or even feel the breeze on his face as he moved. In fact, it seemed to him that the harder he tried to move forward, the more desperately he strove to get to his daughter before the Faun could whisk her away, the farther away he got.

The snow seemed to be everywhere, too; it was falling harder, the drifts were getting taller, and the night was getting darker. The air around him was thicker, colder, and it was almost impossible to see anything clearly. Shapes blurred and shifted; he knew things were happening around him, but he couldn't see them.

He heard the cold, clear jingle of sleigh bells and a sharp, silvery laugh that made his very flesh creep with horror. Honeyed words, with poison beneath them . . . the smell of something sweet and sticky, utterly repulsive. He felt soft, thick fur pressing to his face. Cold, dead fur, with something cold, dead and evil underneath it, it clung and wrapped and sought to smother him. He fought it frantically, trying to beat it off, but it was only when he finally had to gasp for breath there came a rush of cold air, sweeter and cleaner than any he had ever known. Borne on that breeze was the most terrible sound he had ever heard; his daughters were weeping as if their hearts might break.

Then the fur was again touching his face, but it was softer, shorter, and velvety. He no longer feared it; to the contrary, cold as it was, he wanted to press his face deeper, burrowing close in much the way the children had done with Maura when they were babies. As he touched the rich, cool velvet in the darkness, struggling to understand where he had felt it before, something beneath it breathed; a heart beat, the fur rippled all throughout with heat, and something, with great, deep breaths, _lived_.

The girls no longer wept. They laughed. He heard them, even as he let himself be buoyed by the joy beneath the velvet all around him. There was a rumble, as if from a great distance, and then came a sound he would never forget, so deep it shook the world and so loud it rattled his very bones and made his heart leap within him. Louder than cymbals, louder than drums, louder than the greatest thunder you have ever heard, was the roar; a roar, a great cry, a shout of promise— of victory.

For a man who had spent as long as he had, surrounded by darkness, cold, and death, Bill should perhaps have been surprised to know it for what it was, but even for him there could be no mistaking it. Swaddled as he was, cradled in velvet, blanketed in warmth, even as the war in which he fought still raged beyond the walls of the tent in which he lay dreaming, Bill Pevensie knew what that roar meant; somewhere, after sides had fought for longer than any one man could remember, a war had finally been won.

Then it was black, everywhere, but still warm and still good, and he slept in peace for an hour or more before beginning to dream once more.

O0O0O0O

The first thing he heard was water splashing. The second thing he heard was laughter, and he knew it was his children who were laughing. The darkness slipped away into sunlight —rather like opening your eyes just as the sun comes through a window— and he saw he was standing on the shore of a sparkling sea. Lucy and Peter were standing in the tide up to their knees, splashing one another with great vigour. Susan sat on the shore, laughing as she watched them, and Edmund stretched out on the grass beside her.

In that strange, detached way of dreams, Bill saw that they were all dressed very oddly. The girls wore long, simple dresses in rich jewel tones, and the boys wore the sort of breeches, blouses and jerkins you saw in children's picture books with ladies and knights-errant. It did not occur to him to wonder why it was so; that's how it is with dreams, of course. Large cats may sprout purple whiskers and begin to speak to you, and you will answer back and think nothing of it at the time. It was no wonder, then, that to see his children wearing peculiar clothing did not bother Bill Pevensie. Instead, he moved forward so he could see them better.

Aside from the clothes, they did not look much older than they had when he saw them in the unfamiliar room. Peter looked perhaps calmer, Susan slightly less severe, and Edmund no longer looked like a storm cloud, but otherwise, they were largely unchanged. Lucy's fair hair was only a little longer than it had been when she met the Faun in the woods; damp, now, it clung to her neck as she laughed, dove at the crashing surf and scooped up a handful of water to fling at her brother. The droplets caught the sunlight, and sparkled like diamonds.

Bill thought he had seen very few things as beautiful.

"Do Kings and Queens get many holidays?" It was Susan, sounding exceptionally wistful. Edmund, settled beside her and basking rather like a cat in a sunbeam, said he didn't know.

"I rather doubt it, though," he said, "so we had really better make the best of this one . . . oho! Peter, you'd better watch yourself, she nearly had you, just now!"

And indeed, Lucy had dived for Peter's knee, taking her brother's leg out from under him and dropping him to one knee. He got very wet, though he didn't go under entirely, and much whooping and jeering followed as Lucy stood in the lapping waves and planted her fists on her hips, beaming in triumph. Susan was clapping, laughing and evading Edmund's attempts to silence her as he cheered on their brother in his attempt to get Lucy back by scooping her up bodily and dunking her beneath the waves.

Bill, watching them, wondered at the comfort of it all; he marvelled that such easy, simple joy could be theirs. If there was a war, somewhere; if somewhere there was ugliness, and death, and hopelessness, his children had escaped it, untouched. Instead they played at the seaside, as carefree as the whole family had been before the war had begun and taken him away. His sons were strong and healthy, his daughters cheery and brimming with confidence.

Watching them now, seeing in them every trait and strength he could have wished for them, Bill Pevensie felt something tight in his chest relax. He forgot —if he had even thought of it to begin with— that it was a dream, that surely this meant nothing more than that he wished these simple, good things for his children and so his mind had conjured it up. Instead, watching them, he felt it must be so; the colours were so clear and sharp, the sound of his children's laughter exactly as it had been when last he heard it for real, that he couldn't doubt it. His children lived, and thrived, and were well.

No knowledge could have warmed him as did that. No thought could have calmed him, no sight could have cheered him half as much as this. Again Lucy splashed the water, and again the light caught it; caught, refracted, and dazzled him. Brighter and brighter it grew, and with a rushing, roaring sound it came up all around him. Then, with the dimmest, faintest echoes of that first powerful roar, he saw the light dim, and darken, and blackness swaddled him again.

O0O0O0O

Bill walked through long, dark corridors, looking for light. Beneath his feet were stones, cool and flat and reasonably clean. On the walls around him hung heavy rugs, or— no, he saw, they were tapestries. There was light, now; coming from somewhere up ahead, there was sunshine, and it illuminated the scenes on the tapestries around him, highlighting gold and silver threads, brightening scenes that charmed and amused him. People and beasts seemed to interact together; dancing, even dining with each other.

As he studied the artwork, he became aware of laughter. Somewhere, farther down the corridor, there were people. He moved toward the sound, drawn by the simple merriment of it. Rounding a corner at the end of the long corridor, he found himself standing at the edge of a small courtyard, richly carpeted with grass. Sitting in the centre of it were four people it took him almost a minute to recognise, and when he did . . . he stared.

Standing, striking a comical pose, his face contorted in a truly farcical expression, was a young man who barely looked like his son. On closer inspection he decided Edmund could hardly be more than three or four years older than when he had last seen him, but still . . . the difference was unfathomable. The last traces of sulky boyhood seemed to have vanished into distant ages, leaving a handsome, laughing youth in his place.

"Come on, Lucy!" he laughed, "I can't hold this face forever, you know! If you don't guess it in the next minute, they'll win!"

"Oh, we're used to that," the other young man grinned.

Peter, Bill thought, had never looked more like a knight straight out of an old poem than he did now. His head bare, his face writ with something inescapably noble, he regarded his brother with high amusement. He sat sideways on a bench, his back braced against a tree and one leg stretched out before him as the other, braced lightly against the ground, kept him steady. Something about the casual posture balanced the regal look of him. Bill might have gone on staring indefinitely, had a soft laugh not redirected his attention.

"I could do with a change," Susan was smiling, looking up at Edmund as he continued to contort himself in the most incredible fashions. "Why shouldn't they win? You're certainly putting a marvellous effort into it, Edmund . . . just don't fall over as you did last time!"

"Yes," Lucy chortled, "or I'll be laughing so hard I'll never guess it!"

If his sons had changed considerably since he saw them last, Bill thought, then his daughters had undergone a complete metamorphosis. He could scarcely call them children now; even Lucy, who could not have been older than twelve, held herself as a young lady would. The tangled blonde pigtails were gone, replaced by rippling waves of golden curls, cascading down her back. Her merry face was tilted upward, dimples engraved deep in each soft little cheek as she struggled to evaluate her brother's pose.

Beside her sat Susan, also smiling, although with a softer expression than her sister. Susan, who had nearly been a young lady when last Bill saw her, was every inch one now. Her hair, too, was impossibly long, the single raven plait falling past the seat of the bench on which she sat with Lucy. She looked taller, even seated as she was, and something about her . . . Bill felt a deep, sorrowful hitch in his chest. The way she tipped her chin, and fluttered long, lovely fingers on one knee in contemplation of Edmund's posture . . . she looked like Maura.

"I have it!" Lucy leaped her feet all at once, clapping her hands in glee just as Peter opened his mouth, no doubt to announce that time was up, "oh, I have it, Edmund, you're the statue by the back stairs! That funny one, with the— Edmund, you're the Hare!"

"Got it in one!" Edmund whooped, and caught his little sister by the hands to twirl her about the lawn in a gleeful dance. "Lucy, I could kiss you! You got it! We won!"

These unsportsmanlike jubilations were so enchanting to behold that Bill didn't even notice the stout, solemn-faced Dwarf until the fellow had actually entered the courtyard and gave an embarrassed little cough.

"Not to be interrupting your Majesties," he murmured, "but the council is ready to sit, if it suits you . . ."

The gaiety of the four, Bill noticed, was tempered at once by the announcement, although none of them stopped smiling. Peter spoke for all of them, saying they would be in straightaway, and Bill had only time to consider it a marvel that none of them challenged their brother's authority before the sun, which had been shining down with considerable force to begin with, grew brighter, and brighter, and brighter, until there was only white light all around him.

It wasn't dazzling, as the light on the sea had been; this was softer, and warmer, and much gentler. There was somewhere, he thought, the sound of a purr, yet deeper and richer a purr than he had ever heard before. It was the sort of purr that could rattle your teeth in your head, if it were pitched just right. Then the sound softened, and the light dimmed, turning to a soft, pearly grey. The world outside grew closer, pushing in, crowding him. The new place, where his children were safe and happy and growing, faded, drew back, and was lost to him in the haze.

It was with a start and a scowl that Bill Pevensie woke up.

O0O0O0O

For most of the day, Bill could hardly focus. They were retreating, all of them, hundreds of thousands of men pushed back, crowded onto the beach at Dunkirk. French, English, Belgians . . . all of them, one snarled tangle, rumours flooding through their midst with the higher-ups powerless to stem the worst of the flood.

One group of men insisted that the Germans were falling back. There was a lack of order in their ranks that made a successful assault impossible, and they would be driven back from France before another fortnight had passed. But looking around them, few could credit it. They were hemmed in, the water at their back and the Germans advancing at the front, and a slow, steady tide of despair was beginning to rise up around them. To hold it off as long as possible, they gathered in groups, and spoke of home.

Language was, of course, a difficulty. The Dutch had some French, the French had some English, and the English managed to make a thorough butchering of French and Dutch alike, but what with a combination of hand gestures, tattered photographs and the few words they did have in common, they managed to make their stories known. One man had a sweetheart waiting for him at home; one man had two, and was in no hurry to return to either. One fellow had a little boy at home just learning to walk, and one had a daughter he had never seen; she had been born the day after he left.

Bill, with no small amount of pride, displayed his photographs along with the rest. There was one of Maura just herself, taken shortly before the war broke out. She had hated it— she felt she didn't look "done up" enough, or some such thing, but he loved it. She sat on the garden wall, making a face at the camera, scrunching up her nose and, he remembered, telling him he was as bad as the boys when he got his hands on some new gadget. The camera, as he recalled, had taken up a good deal of his time . . . but with such subjects, who could blame him?

Maura, her face so expressive as she told him to put the camera down; the boys, beaming up at him from a plot of earth as they made a shambles of what had been meant to be their own little victory garden; and the girls, Susan stiffly posed, perched on the edge of her chair and Lucy, standing behind her, looking exasperated at the farce. She had wanted to press the camera's buttons herself.

The one photograph he hadn't taken was of all six of them. In this Maura was as "done up" as she could get, and the children were scrubbed to a painful shine. They didn't look like _them_, exactly, but he loved it all the same, and appreciative noises were made by the men as they shared the little treasures around.

"Your boys, your girls, they grow big while you are here, yes?" a large, amiable man beamed at Bill, and Bill smiled back, saying yes, he imagined they did. Unbidden, then, the image rose in his mind of the four of them gathered in that funny little courtyard, Edmund, posing so comically for the others, Susan so softened, Lucy so much older than she had been, and Peter, on the verge of manhood, reclining on the bench and laughing.

"Yes," he repeated, "they have."

Then he gathered the photographs back, tucking them carefully into his breast pocket and closing his eyes, shutting out, for a moment, the sounds of voices around him. They were on the beach, cornered like a lot of rats in a trap, and yet all he wanted right now was to sleep. What was it the man had said?

_To sleep, perchance to dream . . . _

One could only hope.

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** After taking the time to sketch this out a bit more thoroughly, I now have a much firmer idea of where it's going. There should be four chapters after this (or three and an epilogue, depending on how you look at it). Thank you, everybody, for your lovely reviews of the past chapter; check back next week for the next one!

Up next: The Good Place.


	3. The Good Place

The Good Place

O0O0O0O

If Bill had made himself think about it, he would probably have concluded that wanting to go to sleep just to shut out the world around him was not only childish, it was dangerous, too. But then he thought of the faces of his children as he had seen them last in England, and of the faces of the strong, healthy children who, at least in his heart, were growing up safe and far away from everything he had wanted to save them from, and it gave him a strength that was better and deeper than any number of army drills could ever do. The sound of their laughter, even if it only echoed in his head in the uneasy dark of the beach at night time, warmed him more than a hundred mud-stained blankets ever could. So Bill closed his eyes, and rested his head, and welcomed the thought that one more night with his family could take him far away from all of this.

He couldn't tell when he fell asleep. If you had asked him, he might even have told you that he wasn't sleeping yet; he was still quite awake. Of course he was no longer on a beach in Dunkirk, so if he'd thought about it for a minute he would probably have known he was sleeping, but nobody asked him. So Bill, moving through a field of tall, waving grass, a blue sky overhead and sun washing down on him, thought of nothing but how lovely everything was. Behind him, presently, he heard the pleasant thobbity-thub of horse hooves on the ground, but everything was so lovely that Bill found no need to turn around and see the horse. It would reach him in good time, and until it did, why should he rush it? Instead he admired the gilding of the once-green grass, and thought that it must be summer, but late summer; simply too warm to quite be autumn yet.

"Whoa." The admonition was gentle, but had the ring of authority. It made Bill look up at last to see the horse he had heard approaching. It was a striking little animal, its glossy coat a lovely, deep red chestnut, its head uncommonly delicate and its features finely-wrought. It stood in the midst of the field, the tall grass tickling its belly as it mouthed the bit and waited for further instruction from its rider. There was a wicked glint in its eye that suggested it would be glad of the chance to get the upper hand in the situation, but for now at least, it merely stood where its rider bade it.

The rider, he who had spoken with such strength, was a grown man with a lordly bearing and an easy, confident seat on his horse. He wore no armour, but a sword was belted at his side and the horse wore light mail, such as horses do for training exercises. The scene was so intriguing that Bill spent some time studying the nice picture the pair made, the strong, fierce little horse and the noble man astride it. It was not until the man, with a laugh such as Bill had never heard in his life, gave the horse a pat and told it to step lively, that it occurred to him to look at the man's face, and when he had, he could hardly believe it.

It was Peter. His son was no longer a boy or even a boy growing up, but rather was a grown man. He wore the same type of archaic clothing as he had when Bill last saw him, and he sat his horse like a king as he persuaded the creature to leave off all temerities for the time being. And his laugh . . . it was unsettling. That was the only word for it. There was such unbridled joy in Peter's laugh, such wealth of feeling that was so simply, clearly good, it almost hurt to hear.

It had, Bill thought, been a long time since something had been that good.

The exercises Peter put his horse through made little sense to his father. He was riding the animal the length of the field, and as he rode he drew his sword and swing it in a studied pattern, but with no opposition to his blows. Gamely the horse galloped down the field, wheeled at Peter's order, and galloped back up, paying no mind as its rider executed a series of what looked like terribly complicated thrusts and downswings that made Bill's shoulder ache to watch.

If his son had been any younger, he'd have worried about the boy wielding such an evidently deadly weapon, but the fact that he was so obviously an adult, coupled with the easy, practised way he held it went far to putting Bill's mind at ease, and allowing him to simply admire his son's prowess with the sword.

"Whoa," Peter instructed at last, and as before, the horse slowed with a sort of obedience that suggested he was only doing this as a courtesy to Peter, rather than out of any sense of obligation. "There you go," Peter smiled, swinging down from the animal and giving his neck a fond pat. "Now for a walk."

Bill wasn't sure how it happened, but somehow he ended up falling into step with the pair, hovering slightly behind Peter's right shoulder, where he was able to hear everything that was said as Peter addressed his horse.

"Let's see the Marshals say we aren't ready now!" he chuckled, and scratched behind the horse's twitching ear. "In fact, I'd like to see them dare to say you aren't readier than I!"

The horse did not answer, but it tossed its head as if to say yes, he knew he was. Peter rubbed affectionate knuckles along the length of the horse's neck, kneading the muscular flesh until the horse visibly softened toward him, and even bent his head a little closer. Bill, watching, wondered where Peter had learned to handle a horse like that. Peter, unaware of Bill, merely smiled at the animal's reaction for a moment before his face closed over, and he became solemn.

"I'm glad you're ready," he said, and his voice was heavier. "We may not need to be now, but soon . . ." He stopped walking and so did the horse, the pair of them regarding one another with matched solemnity. "Soon we might. That's the thing about the good times, you know; when you've had the bad to go with them, you appreciate the quiet moments all the more." And he looked so serious that it seemed rather odd, given the tranquility of the meadow around them. Bill might even have wondered what it was that his son had to be so grave about, had the sun not been shining and the skies so clear that it hardly seemed to matter. Only Peter appeared troubled, and only the horse before him seemed to understand why.

"When it comes down to it," he told the horse, "whenever we might need to leave next, I'm counting on you to bring me back to them." And then, as if that had been all the gravity he could handle, Peter smiled again, fit his foot to the left stirrup and swung easily up onto the horse once more.

"Enough of this," he breathed, gathering the reins, "it's not a day for being glum, is it? For now, we don't have to work at being thankful. So come on, then," backing the horse and turning him toward the path that had brought them into the field to begin with, "let's stretch your legs."

And in a flash of mane and tail and the glow of the sun on the horse's flanks, the pair went pounding back across the field, leaving Bill standing behind them and feeling, quite simply, at peace.

O0O0O0O

There was no gradual transition this time; no darkening, brightening or fading. One moment he was in a field, listening to the drumbeat of a horse's hooves recede into the distance, and the next he was standing in a large, warmly-lit hall in the midst of a crowd. The hall was not hot but it was comfortably warm, so Bill was surprised when a gust of sharp, smoky air blew on his face.

"Goodness, do shut the door!" the edict made him jump, although the voice was familiar. He turned and saw her— Susan, now a grown lady, hurrying across the floor of the hall, frowning. "Yes, and bar it, too, until they come home . . . thank you," as figures near the door complied. "That's much nicer."

Then she turned to bend over a table, and all around him, Bill now saw, there was activity; it was the oddest sort of scene, the sort you would only see in a dream. Animals, small dwarfs, Fauns like the one he had seen in the forest and yes, he saw, a handful of humans as well, were hard at work. They stood at long, low tables filled with what looked like meat and vegetables. Barrels were open beside the tables, and every table and each group who stood at it were responsible for a different food. One table was salting strips of meat, and another was preparing fish to be salted and stored. Onions, he saw, were being arranged for storage too, and so were kidney beans, dried corn . . .

The workers around the tables were very cheerful for ones working so hard. They joked and laughed; many of them sang. At first Bill marvelled at this, but as he continued to watch, he saw why it was that they were in such good spirits. As those around the tables worked, bending their efforts to the task at hand, Susan made her way from table to table, speaking to one person, encouraging another, and always, Bill saw, she would smile.

Susan's smile affected Bill in much the same way that Peter's laugh had done; it was startlingly, almost frighteningly good. It softened and lit her already lovely face, and watching Susan as she spoke with a nodding Dwarf, Bill felt pride, sharp and almost painful, bite at his chest. His daughter had grown into a young lady any parent might delight in, and watching her speak with the people in the room, and seeing their love for her, he realised he had never been more proud.

"Are you done already?" Susan marvelled, stopping to compliment a plump Squirrel— the very largest one of its kind that Bill had ever seen.

"Indeed, indeed, your Majesty," the Squirrel chattered, "indeed to be sure that I am, your Majesty, and I only hope—" he froze a moment, his nose twitching, and watched with wide, interested eyes as the barrel he had loaded with chestnuts was nailed shut and rolled away— "that you will be glad, Majesty, even delighted to find me, if it pleases you, another task to perform, indeed."

"I am sure we have something around here that wants doing," Susan laughed. "Come, let's find Mrs Clogg and ask her if—" but she broke off here at the sound of a horn trumpeting somewhere beyond the wide stone walls, and a smile even more brilliant swept across her face.

"Your Majesty!" a chubby Faun trotted briskly into the room at the far end of it, "if it pleases your Majesty, the hunters have returned!"

"Well, if they've brought us anything else I say that they can jolly well skin the next lot themselves!" one worker decided, and warm laughter greeted the joke.

Susan laughed too, but Bill couldn't help but notice that her attention was no longer on the preparations at hand; it had moved beyond the walls, outside to where the hunting party was gathering in the courtyard once more. Excusing herself to the Squirrel, Susan moved away from the table. She swept past Bill as she made her way for the door, passing so close he could feel the rush of air as her skirts swept the flagstones, and as she passed, he heard her humming. Her face glowed with quiet contentment, and as she drew nearer he heard her speak.

"Home," she sang softly, clearly addressing only herself, "they're home. They're safe, thank you, and here, and oh, lovely, perfect thing . . . they're home."

And with an expression that could only be described as pure delight, she laid one hand —Maura's hand; the same long, slim fingers, the light, friendly touch. He would never look at Susan again without seeing so much of her mother in her— on the latch, lifted it, and swept out into the autumn afternoon to greet her family.

O0O0O0O

Again, it was sudden. Susan closed the door, and then, as if he had done nothing more than blink, the great hall fell away and was replaced by a much smaller room. It was a library; Bill noted that the light beyond the window was no longer the warm glow of a late summer sun, or even the cheery light of autumn torches set along the walls of a castle kitchen hall, but rather the cool, grey light of winter. Snow fell outside, and made the small fire in the fireplace extremely welcome.

The plush chairs drawn up to the fireplace were four in number, but only two were occupied, one by a pair of extremely large sleeping cats, and the other by —Bill wondered if he would ever stop being surprised to find them so changed— his younger son. Edmund had a book open on his lap, but he was not reading it. Instead, he gazed into the flames before him, and looked, Bill thought, rather like a scholar as he did. His was not Peter's build; Edmund was longer, leaner, and Bill guessed that if they stood side by side, Edmund might well be the taller. Now, though, Edmund was not standing; Edmund was decidedly slouching. One of the cats yawned, stretched, and batted sleepily at the other cat's ears.

"Pulla doesn't like that, Tug," Edmund murmured, and Tug, thusly addressed, yawned again, and picked idly at the chair with sharp claws.

"She's asleep," he said, and the voice was so exactly how you might imagine a sleepy cat's—slow, precise, and heavily burred with self-satisfaction— that Bill found he couldn't bring himself to be surprised at hearing it. "She doesn't know."

"Very well, then," Edmund said, and spared the cat a glance of great amusement, "but if she wakes up and swats you for it, be warned, I may laugh."

"Duly noted, Sire," Tug purred, and yawned again.

Edmund smiled, and studied the flames. The atmosphere in the room was close, but not stuffy; it was really rather cosy. Bill, warmed by the fire and the pleasant nearness of his resting son and the two cats, found he felt almost as if he were dozing as he watched the remainder of the scene play out.

Edmund, for his part, watched the fire snap a few minutes more before shutting his book with a sigh. "No use, that," he said, mostly to himself, but Tug, busy washing his paws and passing them briskly over his ears, heard, and looked up.

"Sire?"

"Sorry," Edmund smiled, "I was just saying there's no point in trying to read. I was thinking of something else."

"A worthy pastime," Tug decided, finishing with his ears and paws and dedicating himself to his elbows. "Pleasant thoughts, I trust?"

"Mostly . . ." Edmund traced one finger absently over the cover of the book he held. "A dispute was brought before me today. A matter of courtship."

Tug paused in his ablutions. "Courtship? Matters of planning a marriage?"

"Mmm."

"Do you normally handle such matters, Sire?" Tug asked, and Bill was momentarily stirred from his pleasant, dozing state to be amused at the thinly-concealed scepticism in the cat's voice. Edmund, it seemed, heard it too; his smile looked very like his father's.

"I do not. I asked Queen Susan to hear the issue. She handles such things far better than I."

Tug's ensuing purr sounded distinctly approving. "The Queen's grace is the soul of tact," he murmured, and Edmund nodded in agreement. "And yet," Tug's amber eyes narrowed to contemplative slits, "you are dissatisfied."

Bill supposed nobody would detect concealed dissatisfaction better than a cat.

"Slightly . . ." Edmund shut his eyes. "I always am, when I can't help."

Again Tug purred, a sound strongly reminiscent of Edmund's reflective 'mmm.' It seemed, Bill thought, that both his son and the cat were feeling the way he did; pleased and dozy, but still clear-headed enough to focus on the problem at hand.

"But Sire," Tug stretched, comfortably lazy in his chair beside the still-slumbering Pulla, "you are largely successful, are you not?"

"Sometimes, perhaps . . . very well," Edmund sighed, "most times."

"They call you Just." The cat's tone was no longer wry, as it had previously been, and Tug regarded his sovereign with tranquil eyes. "Your people appeal to you when they cannot trust themselves to be fair-minded."

"Yes . . ." Edmund sat forward, rubbing his face. Tug, sprawled in a somewhat leonine pose beside Pulla, continued to watch him as he spoke again.

"And when you cannot settle a dispute, you pass the matter on to those who are best suited so to do. In this case, her Majesty."

"Yes."

"Then I do not see, your Majesty," and the use of this title had none of the thinly-veiled irony that his previous use of 'Sire' had done, "how you can berate yourself for what I cannot term aught but success." And, with distinct lack of ceremony he returned to scouring his paws, leaving Edmund to reflect, and Bill to watch him.

Once his son stopped confiding in the cat, of course, Bill couldn't tell what he was thinking, but Edmund had never been very good at hiding what he felt, so his father didn't miss the way the tension seemed to slip from the young man's shoulders as he sat there. Neither, it seemed, did the cat; his preening session at last completed, Tug sat up and studied the King with smug approval.

"Much improved, Sire?" he enquired delicately, and the look Edmund gave the cat was one of amused exasperation.

"If you must know, you infuriating beast, I rather am. As you say, I could not help them, and so I arranged for them to meet with someone who could. That I was able to do that much for them . . . it was a privilege, not a failure."

And with that conclusion reached, Edmund settled back a bit deeper in his chair, smiling. Tug, looking as pleased with himself as only a cat can look, cuddled down beside his still-dozing friend, and began to purr.

O0O0O0O

This time Bill missed seeing the scene shift because his eyes were almost closed. The warmth of the fire had lulled him into a good, warm place, and he still felt warm when he opened his eyes again and found that he was standing in a pool of sunshine, again outside, but not in a meadow as before. Instead he was in a wood, and a small, rather murky pool of water lay before him in a clearing. He was not surprised to see that the young woman who stood beside it, gazing down into the water with her arms crossed over her chest, was Lucy, now grown.

She had, he thought, changed the least of the four. Her face was still sweet and round, though the rest of her had slimmed and lengthened, and even though her expression was grave, she still retained her dimples. Her hair was even longer than when her father had last seen it, but otherwise . . . he would have known her anywhere.

The large Raven that lighted on the branch of the tree affected a long, raspy clearing of its throat, and made itself known. Lucy at once looked up to greet the bird with a radiant smile, and cordially asked after his family. The Raven went on at some length on this subject, and Lucy expressed interest; Bill, who was not personally acquainted with the Raven, chose to look around instead.

The wood was damp with still-melting snow, but green shoots of grass were beginning to fight through the soil. The sun was not exuberant just yet, but standing beneath it, Bill felt the potential. The whole wood, it seemed, was on the verge of bursting forth with new life, but for the moment it held back, and in this quiet place, at this transition point, stood his daughter. Now that the Raven had finally wound down its recitation of family news, he politely enquired after the health of Lucy's family, and she assured him that they were well.

"They don't like to come out at the start of the spring," she admitted, "because it's so wet, but after a whole winter inside I simply can't wait! They'll be waking up, soon," she finished, and for a moment Bill thought she meant her siblings, but then she turned enraptured eyes on the nearest tree. Bill, looking at it, thought it looked just like a tree, but the Raven seemed to understand what she meant.

"Any day now," he agreed, ruffling his feathers. "Then it will really be spring, won't it? The new alders, and the little maple shoots . . . the whole place will just teem with chatter! It gets so a fellow can hardly get a word in edgewise," he concluded mournfully, and Bill thought it was nothing less than a miracle that Lucy kept a mostly-straight face at this particular complaint.

"Still," she smiled sweetly up at the affronted bird, "things are so pretty in the spring, aren't they? They're _friendlier_. I mean, it gets warmer, and less like winter, and . . . well, people find it a relief, I think, don't they? That the winter can be over each year, now."

Again this remark was beyond Bill, but the Raven agreed with Lucy that it really was a wonderful thing. Then he bobbed a bit in what Bill could only assume was meant as a bow, made his excuses and took wing, leaving Lucy to look back down to the pool at her feet.

For just a moment, all looked as it had when Bill had first happened on the scene, but then something —he couldn't quite place what— seemed to shift, and change, and . . . grow. The tree nearest Lucy rustled in what looked to be —surely had to be— an oddly-placed breeze, but somehow, just watching it, you knew it was not the case. Lucy seemed to know it too; a smile of pure joy lit up her face, and she turned to the tree, her eyes shining.

"Oh," she breathed, and Bill thought he had never heard a sweeter welcome in all his days, "oh, dear trees; good _morning!_"

O0O0O0O

Again the scene slipped away so fast he didn't see it go, but this time, it was not replaced by another. Instead, Bill felt himself drifting, floating through a grey, chilly haze. His head felt clearer, now; he felt less like he was in a dream, and more like that place between asleep and awake, where you know you are likely to wake up very soon, but are not quite ready to just yet.

Bill, feeling cold and very far away from everything, wanted to wake up. He began to fight his way toward consciousness, when he remembered that it was when he was conscious that things were at their coldest. He tried to back-pedal, but it was too late; the grey haze was lightening, and coming clearer. He was cold, and shivering, and he could feel the coarse cloth of his blanket under his fingers as he clutched at it, trying to draw it closer around him.

He still fought, struggled to go back and find his way through the thicker part of the haze to wherever his children were, but it was no good. Men's voices filtered in, the fog thinned, the cold intensified, and he knew the surf that crashed nearby was not on any beach where he would want his children to swim. His children were gone, his wife was miles away, and he was on a beach with the Germans closing in, getting nearer by the hour.

Worst of all, he was waking up.

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** Going by my self-imposed schedule this is a day late, and I apologise for that. I'm trying to get better about doing things on time but it wasn't edited by Friday and I couldn't bring myself to post until it was!

Up next: The Grim Place.


	4. The Grim Place

The Grim Place

O0O0O0O

Things looked grim the next morning; when Bill joined the men on the beach all they could talk about was the sickening massacre at Le Paradis in the Pas-de-Calais. A few French citizens had spread the word, and all who heard it were horrified. What was more, any hope once held by those trapped on the Dunkirk beach that surrender to the Germans would not be the end of them was dashed. If that was what happened to men who surrendered . . . no thank you, they all agreed. Better to stand up and take aim than to be lined up against a barn wall.

The Germans now had them completely bottled in, flanking them with devastating efficiency. The Channel had never looked so cruelly welcoming, the glittering, sun-washed waves concealing a network of mines beneath. Word was that the Allies who were trapped outside their little prison would be taken before two days were up, and at that point the artillery fire that had driven them back to the northern beach would begin in earnest.

"Why they haven't sent the tanks in by now I'll never guess," one of the English soldiers said hollowly, puffing frantically on a shoddy, hand-wrapped cigarette. "Unless they want to wait until we're all hemmed in here and make a clean sweep of the lot of us . . . that could be it, I suppose."

It could be and quite possibly was; Bill saw the ugly, perfect logic of what the fellow said —he couldn't for the life of him remember the boy's name. Charters? Chalmers? Something like that— but he tried not to focus on it. This, he told himself, was not cowardly to do; after all, there was already too much ugliness all around to accuse himself of wanting to hide from it. One _couldn't_ hide from it. It wasn't possible.

The nearby harbour was clogged with the downed ships, the German planes having bombed them to cut off the possibility of an escape. All around them nobody said it, but in every face, English, French, Dutch and otherwise, one could see the helpless, woeful wondering: how much longer could it last? Although the section of the beach where he and his company were penned in was enjoying a shaky respite from the shelling, it seemed to hardly matter, if one was expecting that at any day he might go to sleep with the ground shaking all around him, and simply not wake up.

Of course, Bill thought, as he settled in that night, there were lots worse things that could happen to a fellow than to never wake up . . .

O0O0O0O

"What can be done?"

It was the rudest entry into the dream-world that Bill had ever received. All around him was cold and pitch-blackness, and he felt singularly alone. The voice that spoke was harsh, and edged with a ragged despair that Bill recognised almost at once, for it so closely mirrored his own.

"Very little, I am afraid, your Majesty." The one who replied was calmer than the first, but his voice was somehow the worse to hear. While the first speaker was still desperate, still willing to believe that fighting hard enough would solve all, the second had already given himself up to whatever defeat awaited them. "Our numbers are divided along the ridge here," a slight rustle of paper, "and the Island forces have got this section hemmed in so neatly, it's dreadful impressive."

"And you mean to tell me that we have no means at our disposal to reach them?"

"Quite so, Sire."

"I see."

When he first began to hear this exchange, Bill had been standing in the dark and cold. As the conversation went on, however, the area began to lighten ever so slightly, as if dawn was approaching but not quite ready to burst into full sunrise. In the lightening of the place, Bill could make out first shapes, then shadows, then silhouettes and now, finally, faces and furniture. A guttering lamp stood on a low table, illuminating a much-marked map, and over the map stood two men whose faces were drawn with the same type of fatigue that had become second nature to Bill over the past weeks.

One of the men was a heavy, bearded fellow with battered armour and a dented helmet. The other, younger and visibly wearied, his clothes hanging off a frame that had not received proper nourishment in at least a fortnight, was his son. Peter stared at the map before him with such desperate hunger that Bill feared he would soon clutch and tear it in one final effort to shake from it the answer he wanted to see.

"There must be a way," he breathed, his eyes —sunk terribly into the sleepless hollows of his head— searching the lines of the parchment before him. "I cannot conceive that there would not be some means of . . . there must be a way."

"Your Majesty . . ." the man who stood beside Bill's son looked at Peter with the sort of gentle sympathy that all older men reserve for those who have not seen as much of the world as they. "With your Majesty's pardon . . . there is none. I understand what must have prompted you to believe that this war could be won; I understand, too, that you went into this with better intentions than those who convinced you to ally yourself with them. But this venture has been doomed from the beginning, Sire, and while I would never presume to lecture you, the friend and ally of my own sovereign, on choices made in the past, I charge you now to look at this, here," slapping one broad, callused palm down on the table and the map it bore, "and understand that it is over. More than that, I fear, it should never have begun."

The words, Bill saw, came as a cruel blow to his son, but not in the way that a shock would do. The news was clearly that which Peter had known in his heart of hearts for some time now, and it was only at the plain speaking of the battle-hardened counsellor that he was finally forced to acknowledge the reality. With a terrible, sick look on his face, the younger man sank slowly onto the couch behind him.

"Then . . . they are doomed."

"They, and the land they were sent to pillage. It will be generations before the destruction they have wrought is ever put to rights."

"And . . . I have been a party to it." Peter, shaking, put his face in his hands, and missed what Bill saw; the look of tender sympathy that softened the hard lines of the older man's face.

"You, Sire, were a party with a heart for the good, which is more than can be said for the King who rallied you to his side."

"That is no excuse; a poor one, at very best."

"And yet I do not say it to excuse you, your Majesty; I say it only to make plain to you that I do not fault your youth, nor do I scorn your will to give aid. The matter was put to you falsely, shown in such a light that your love for all people was played upon most cruelly, and drew you into folly. Men have been lost who should not have been, and a sickening many more will join their number before all is over and done . . . but no more than need be, if you will consent to heed my advice, and begin the retreat."

Bill ached, at that moment, to join the bearded man; he longed to rush to his son's side, to put his hands on Peter's shoulders and draw him up, strengthen him, encourage and reassure him that whatever had happened to bring about the disaster that had become so plain to him would pass; that this terrible thing was not real, was in fact nothing more than the stuff of nightmares. But his feet stayed rooted to the ground, and he did not move. It was Peter, of his own accord, who raised his head, and even through his anguish, remorse and bone-deep fatigue, looked every inch a King.

"Give the order," he breathed, and Bill saw that even when his son was grown, his voice still cracked when he was fighting tears. "Go now and give the order. We will break camp at dawn; I command a retreat."

And he returned his face to his hands as the man bowed low and left the tent, dropping the flap in place behind him. At the close of the flap the tent fell again into darkness; had Bill not been looking right at Peter as the shadows swathed them both, he would have missed seeing his son's shoulders begin to shake.

O0O0O0O

The darkness lightened in the same way it had before, with the sunless glow of coming dawn. This time the figure Bill saw was not that of his son, but that of his daughter. Susan, her hair hanging loose, sat at a low window and looked out over one of the prettiest cities Bill had ever seen. It called to mind the exotic images in the books he had read as a child, all of Mr Haggard's thrilling adventure stories and those other much-treasured books that had lined the shelves of his childhood. A wall wrapped around the perimeter of this city and torches blazed in the parapets, casting a romantic glow over the whole structure, but one look at Susan's face was enough to betray the fact that she was not as enchanted by the sight before her as was her father. Indeed, he thought, she looked quite terrified.

A noise behind him caused Susan to spin around with a small cry, and Bill whirled to follow her gaze to the door. There was a pause, and then a soft creak as the door swing inward and an anxious face appeared. The woman was young, comely and a stranger to him, but she seemed no stranger to his daughter; on entering, she immediately dropped a deep curtsey and stood straight, twisting her fingers and biting her lip.

"Forgive me, your Majesty," she said breathlessly, "but I couldn't sleep, and I heard a noise in your chambers, so I thought—"

"Peace, Serra," Susan smiled, though her earlier apprehension was still plain as she held out a hand to the other woman in a sort of calming gesture. "If you wish to join me, I would welcome the companionship. These past few days have been very unsettling."

"Oh, yes," Serra crossed the room in a rush to drop into a graceful puddle of cotton and muslin skirts at Susan's feet, "yes, that's exactly it . . . I hardly know what to do, and— oh, forgive me," quickly, at seeing an echo of her own pain appear on Susan's face, "I shouldn't say such things, not when your position is— is—"

"So much more precarious than your own," Susan finished, and looked out over the city. "You need not blush to say it, my dear, it's perfectly true. Only I need remain. The Prince would not care if I sent a thousand ladies away home, if it meant that he would win the prize he sought. You and Elia are safe; our entire party is quite safe, in fact, and I daresay you all may return home the moment I give my consent to wed. Only a fool would imagine it could be otherwise."

"Oh . . ." Serra fumbled with this statement, and Bill saw that Susan was watching the young lady at her feet with the same sort of gentle sympathy she displayed to anybody trying to keep up with her. Serra, it seemed, was not burdened with an excess of reasoning skills, but her loyalty to his daughter was made evident by the next words she spoke.

"You— you want us to leave you? Oh, but your Majesty, I could never! We could never! "

Susan's smile grew positively radiant and she patted the shoulder of the distressed girl. "You are too faithful to me," she declaimed, "and I should think myself a fortunate woman the day I am called worthy of your fealty. You and Elia both will not be forced onto the ship, of course, but look around you, Serra," with a small quiver of revulsion and fear in her voice, "and tell me if this is the sort of land you would call your home. Surely you cannot wish to remain."

Serra looked around the room —from her position on the floor she could not quite see over the sill of the window through which Susan, seated on a low couch, was able to look— and nibbled her lip a moment before looking back to Bill's daughter.

"It's not the nicest sort of place, your Majesty, certainly, but . . . but I think Elia would say as I do, that we're to stay with you, no matter where you go. You're our Queen, you see," with all the candour of a girl half her years, "and you mean a great deal to us."

"Surely not more than the chance to see home again," Susan said softly, and the look on her face, though Bill could not know it, was the very expression that was so often on his when he thought of his wife and children. "Surely I cannot mean more to you than that."

Serra did not contradict Susan, but she sat up very straight, and her bottom lip jutted out in a stubborn sort of way.

"We won't leave you," she promised fiercely. "Not I nor Elia, not the lords and knights, not his little Highness or even the King himself. You must know that, your Majesty; we'll none of us be going home without you."

And if Bill were to guess by the look of sweet relief that broke across his daughter's face, he would have said that they were exactly the words Susan needed to hear. The darkness closed in softly around her smile.

O0O0O0O

"You're mad." Edmund was Edmund even when he could not be seen; there was no way Bill could have mistaken the flat incredulity of his son's voice. The man who replied, however, was a stranger, and as the darkness rolled back, Bill found himself straining to see him. "Magnus, you cannot be serious; the enterprise you propose is sheer—"

"The next word you speak, O King," a heavy, rich voice interrupted in a deceptive drawl, "had best be chosen with care. You are a guest in my home, are you not?"

There was a pause, and when Edmund next spoke, the flatness of his voice remained but was tempered with something more like caution.

"In my concern," he said, "I forgot myself. I am, as you say, your guest. I am also, I hope, your Excellency's friend."

"I count you one of the few." The room was light enough now for Bill to see that the man to whom Edmund spoke matched him in height, but far outstripped him in width of chest and shoulders. Unlike his son, who was clothed neatly in some light, summer variation of the odd garments all his children wore in these dreams, the man Edmund had called Magnus was bare-chested, bearded and swarthy, and looked as if he would be quite at home in the strange, exotic city in which Bill had seen his daughter.

"Then hear me out as a friend, please, Magnus, because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I thought you'd gone into this without me at least making the effort to offer counsel."

The answering grunt sounded vaguely affirmative to Bill, and must have done to Edmund, too, because the young man went on, choosing his words with care.

"Your attacks on the eastern borders may have sustained you thus far, but the size of the onslaught you propose to make is complete folly. Your best hopes lie in keeping on as you were, with the smaller, more orchestrated efforts. It was a style of fighting unfamiliar to your oppressors, and that factor alone is what has daunted them so. The minute you present yourself in open attack you are again at a disadvantage; they will sweep over your army like locusts, and descend on the land. Is that what you would see happen to your people? To your wife, and family?"

There was no great movement on the part of Magnus, but something sharp in his eyes seemed to catch Edmund's attention, because at once the younger man turned pale, and fell silent. There was a long, dreadful pause before Magnus spoke, each word chosen with a dull, deadly care.

"Your words may be wise, but their wisdom is in danger of being lost in the shadow of your tactic of speech. Do not mention my wife again. Do not either speak of the people who trust me to lead them as you attempt to sway me to your point, else I will be forced to reckon with you in a way that would grieve me deeply."

Edmund was quick to comply. His remaining arguments were quiet, well-worded and excellently reasoned, but Bill could see that any good this might have bought his son had already been overshadowed by his imprudent appeal to sentimentality. Whatever the virtues of the warrior who called Edmund his friend, it seemed that sentimentalism was not among them. At the conclusion of Edmund's arguments, Magnus nodded once, and thanked him.

"Well-reasoned and, for the greatest part, wisely-spoken. But I will not change my mind. Now, Edmund," with a gentler sort of gravity, "why not remove yourself and get some rest? You could do with some food, perhaps, and drink, and the company of your sister; I am afraid," with a quick, peremptory gesture at two guards who moved to open the door, "that I have other matters to attend to."

The door banged shut behind him, and darkness washed over Edmund's look of despair.

O0O0O0O

"I don't know. I just— I really do not know." The voice was that of a frightened woman. Darkness dropped away like a falling curtain, and in the dim light of a chamber at night time, Bill saw a tall, slender form garbed in heavy nightwear. She was in profile, and the moon beyond the window was full, but even so he would not have known her if she hadn't turned her head, her fair curls silvering under the moonlight.

Lucy. His little Lucy, a grown lady. He didn't think he would ever get used to that.

She was worried; he had heard it in her voice, and he could see it now in her posture. Her small hands knotted and unknotted as she addressed a shadowed figure. "Oh, how I wish the High King had not left things so solely to my own discretion. Truly, I feel such a fool when it comes to . . ." She broke off, and shook her head. "What is it you think of the proposal made by the warlord? Have our friends any chance?"

"It is not my place to say, my Queen," the figure murmured, and Lucy flipped her hand irritably at him. The gesture was one of Maura's, used only when she was at her most impatient.

"Neither is it your place to come to the bedchamber of the guest of your lord and master, a Queen of the country that is even now his only hope against the advancing army, and yet here you stand! Fergus, if you will not give me a straight answer, I will drag it from you! What is it that you think of the plan your master has contrived?"

"Truly, my Queen," the unlucky Fergus said, his misery apparent though his face was not, "I think it ill-advised and doomed to failure."

"Very good," Lucy said briskly, "now we know where we stand. I will rouse my brother, and we will have it out with Magnus. He will not like what we have to say, but he will listen. I will see to that."

"Very good, your Majesty," the man mumbled, and bowed low. Then he vanished, and Bill could not make out how he did it; the dark form simply slipped backward, and was gone.

Lucy, left to her own self, paused just a moment where she stood. Lit by the cool light of the moon, her hair tousled with sleep, Bill could hardly believe it was she; she was so completely a grown woman, it startled and frightened him to see. But her eyes were the same, ingenuous as ever, and the dainty chin, so firm and stubborn, was inescapably her mother's when Maura was at her most defiant. She clenched it now, frowning a moment, and whispered "Aslan, dear Aslan, if you can possibly hear me now . . . help me know how to do this." She shut her eyes, and shook her head. "Because Edmund is going to _shout_."

It was possible that Edmund did; Bill found he would not have doubted anything, now. But he never got the chance to hear it, because the same curtain that had dropped from his vision to reveal the scene was drawn up once more, and, muffled in the velvet darkness as he was, he could have sworn he heard that same purr he had heard several dreams ago, shifting slowly into a soft, deep chuckle. Then it softened, and faded, and again, there was sleep . . .

When he woke, the evacuation had begun.

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** Quite lengthy author's notes here; none of them are crucial, but hopefully some of them are interesting!

Firstly, I feel the need to apologise to all readers (most particularly the historians among you) for the way I have summed the Battle of France and its horrors. Trapped on the beach at Dunkirk as he is, Bill is poised to bear witness to one of the earliest turning points in the history of the Second World War: the rescue and evacuation of over three hundred thousand soldiers. However, because he doesn't yet know it himself, it's difficult for me to properly convey just how significant this really was in contributing to the subsequent Allied victory.

I also don't know if, even with the help of those French citizens aware of it, word of the Le Paradis massacre could really have reached Dunkirk within twenty-four hours, but for purposes of dramatic effect I chose to believe that it could.

Finally, for any and all who may not have caught it yet, many of the little glimpses that Bill is getting are scenes from my other Narnia work. Some of them have been written just for this story, but several of them are actually fore-echoes (except, of course, in the case of Susan's time in Tashbaan, which refers to a fic I've already written) of things I am working on now and/or planning to write in the future. More than anything this story is giving me a little downtime in between "big" pieces, and helping me get some perspective on what's to come. I hope some of it looks at least a little intriguing!

Up next: The Lost Place.


	5. The Lost Place

The Lost Place

O0O0O0O

The evacuations began with what Bill could only think of as great timidity. He helped, so he felt he was in a position to judge. The few boats that came, the few men they pulled off the beaches . . . it was all wretchedly disheartening at first. The first day was the worst, just a few thousand men . . . they went to bed that night worn out, and certain that most of them would still be left to die.

The next day, granted, it got a bit better. More boats, a few more men gotten off the beaches . . but the German planes came, and they made it hard to feel victorious. Amidst the bombing and the desperate attempts to get as many men off the beaches, out of the water and into the boats as they could, everything took on a sort of mechanical feel; Bill ached to escape it, but every day he was on the beach, helping as many men get off it as they could.

They, he felt, should go first. They didn't have what he did: a whole other world to escape to each night. And each night when he closed his eyes for however much sleep he could get, it would be there, the place where his children were strong and grown, alive in a way that he had begun to think he might never have to chance to see. So it would be selfish, he felt, to fight to be the first to escape when he had something as wonderful as that.

Daylight evacuations, everybody agreed as they bedded down for that night, were soon going to be impossible, with the way the German planes kept targeting them, but things were starting to pick up. Tens of thousands, they were certain, had been rescued that day. Although nobody could put an actual number on their success, they found the progress immeasurably encouraging. Soon, they dared to hope, they would be going home.

That night, as he put his head back and shut his eyes, Bill took comfort in knowing that he would be seeing home a little sooner than most.

O0O0O0O

This time it was Maura. Maura, seated at their kitchen table, quite in their own, regular world. She had a sodden handkerchief clutched in her hands, her knuckles bleaching white under the strain of staying composed.

She looked different than she had when he had left her. He couldn't put a finger on it, really; she wasn't older, or younger looking . . . she hadn't even done anything extraordinary with her hair. She simply sat at the table in a dress that was wearing thin at the shoulders, clutching a photograph of the family.

It was not, Bill noted, the photograph in which they had all been scrubbed to within an inch of their lives; it was one that had been taken nearly two years ago, when the family made a trip to the shore. Bill remembered the day vividly: Lucy had lost her pail and spade, Susan and Maura had gotten sunburned and Edmund had put sand in Peter's sandwich, prompting an energetic tussle between the brothers that Bill himself had jammed his thumb in trying to separate, but on the way home they had revelled in the good, clean exhaustion of a day well spent.

"I want to go _back_!" Lucy had declared, just moments before dropping into a sleep so sound that she had had to be carried up to her bed and undressed by her mother, as they simply could not wake her.

They had planned to go back, too, but that year it hadn't been possible, and the next the war had come. Trips to the shore suddenly seemed very extravagant and far away, and they had not discussed even the possibility of it, since. Now Maura sat at the table, her shoulders quivering as she touched one shaking fingertip to each of the faces in the snapshot.

"Be safe," she murmured with each one. "Please, oh please, be safe . . ."

She was changed. He still could not work out how it had happened, and he was certain he did not want to know why, but writ in every line of his wife's face was the change that had taken place since he left her. She worried more, laughed less, and longed for home as much as he.

The empty house around her was not the home they had made.

She was crying, now; tears slipping from clear green eyes as she bent her golden head over the photographs scattered on the table before her, and cried.

Bill almost crossed to touch her. It was what he would have done if he had walked in on this scene in his home, after all— he would have crossed to rest his hands on her shoulders, to squeeze just firmly enough to infuse her with whatever courage she could draw from him, and to look down into her upturned face and draw the same courage from her expression of unswerving determination and devotion to everything she loved as much as did he.

He started to move toward her, too, his hands outstretched, his love and compassion for her a physical ache within him . . . but the kitchen began to blur, the lines fuzzing, the scene clouding over, and he was leaving her, even when he wanted nothing more than to take hold of her, hug her to him, and stay.

O0O0O0O

The room solidified once more, but the kitchen in which Bill now stood was not his own. This was a larger kitchen, and for a moment the stone walls and flagstone floors made him believe he was in that other place, where his children were grown and merry. But then he saw the icebox, and heard the crackle of a wireless set, and he knew it was not so. There were no animals working to make the meals, either; the only animal he could see was a fat, rather dull-looking cat basking in front of the radiator, and the manner in which the women in the kitchen stepped over it made it plain they would not be seeking the pleasure of its conversation any time soon. Instead, they talked amongst themselves, fussing as they did.

"I don't know what's wrong with the poor things," one girl moaned, dicing carrots so vigorously Bill expected that at any moment she would miss, and strike a thumb instead, "they've just been the moodiest children you've ever seen."

"Not at all as they was before," another, slightly older girl concurred, giving a bubbling pot a careless stir. "Mrs Macready, d'you think we ought to mention it to the Professor? Didn't he say as we was to tell him if they was unhappy?"

"That he did, Margaret, but if you don't watch that pot more carefully I'll be the unhappy one, and you'll have far worse to worry about than the children. There, that's much better." Mrs Macready, a short, stout woman with a rolling Scottish burr waited a moment to make sure Margaret was taking her instructions to heart before turning back to count the silverware on the table before her.

"Would the Professor really want to know about this, though?" the girl with the carrots wondered. "I mean, them being only children, and all."

"The Professor, Ivy, was a child himself once, and I'll not hear you accusing him of hard-heartedness," Mrs Macready scowled, and Ivy ducked her head, suitably chastened. "There, third count through, we are still missing a soup spoon. I want the drawers turned inside out until it's found. And where is Betty, anyhow? It's been almost two hours since I sent her to— oh!" with a small start of surprise, turning around, "now, if you didn't give me such a fright!"

"I'm awfully sorry, Mrs Macready," the boy said softly, and Bill stared. He stared, it must be confessed, even harder than he had when he had first seen his son grown; to see Edmund a small child once more was twice as shocking as it was to see him a man. But there he was, short trousers and all, with that familiar cowlick sticking up at the back of his head. He regarded the woman with solemn grey eyes as he made his apology.

"Well," Mrs Macready said, and Bill could see that she was really making an effort to smile at the boy, "no harm done, I suppose. Are you hungry?" A note of hope entered her voice. "You hardly touched your tea."

"I'm sorry," Edmund said, still in that same strange, quiet voice, "I just don't feel like eating."

"None of you have felt like eating since yesterday afternoon, when those day-trippers came through. I hope they didn't give you any sweets; you must know better than to take presents from strangers, a great boy like you."

"Yes, thank you, Mrs Macready, I do," Edmund agreed. "And no, they didn't give any of us any sweets; we just aren't very hungry. May I go out to the garden until supper?"

"I suppose so," Mrs Macready said, her face perplexed. "And here, now," with a sudden, decisive motion of her hand, sweeping a tumbler down from a shelf and filling it with the amber-coloured contents of a nearby pitcher, "would you like a little treat? Your sisters said you like liquorice water."

Edmund, with frightening politeness, agreed that he did. Then he took a few calm, measured sips of the offering, thanked Mrs Macready once more, and set the tumbler on the edge of the table before walking out of the kitchen and through the door that Bill supposed led to the garden.

Before the door closed behind his son, Bill saw the room beginning to melt once more.

O0O0O0O

This time, there was an upward rush. It felt, Bill thought, rather as if he had been standing in a lift, and suddenly he started rising upward, through a foggy mist of a house. The fog cleared only when his feet settled firmly on the floorboards, and he realised he was in a room he had seen before. It was, he saw, the same long room that he had seen the children in ages —no, wait, surely it had only been a few nights— ago. It was brighter and sunnier than it had been then, though, and there was more clutter— a few books strewn about, and a soft shawl of bright and interesting colours padded the back of a large wing chair.

In that chair sat Susan, once more a girl who was not quite a woman. Her hair no longer fell in waves to her feet, but was bound neatly in two rather severe plaits. She no longer wore the sweeping gowns that she and Lucy had favoured in that Other Place; she wore again the plain blouses and simple skirts suited to a child her age. Her young face, however, was pinched and pale enough to make her look a dozen years older, and in Susan's arms, Bill saw, wept Lucy.

Lucy had, Bill remembered, been weeping the last time he saw her here, too. Now, though, her tears were not born of hurt or injustice; they were the deep, melancholy sobs of a woman whose heart was breaking, and they looked painful on a little girl who should have had nothing worse to cry over than a skinned knee.

"Darling," Susan murmured, her little hand petting her sister's tangled blonde hair, "I know it hurts, but we can't keep on like this. We must try to be more like Peter and Edmund, and not think about it very much, else what will the Professor think? He told us not to speak of it if we could help it, do you remember? He said people wouldn't understand."

"Then he doesn't either," Lucy sobbed. "He can't, if he says we shouldn't think of it . . . how can we not?"

"Well," said Susan, "maybe it's something that we'll understand better when we're older. Again." And she cuddled her sister a little closer, looking up only when the door to the room was thrown open with rather a bang.

"Susan, have you seen the— oh." Peter stopped, and stared.

"She's homesick," Susan murmured, and pressed her lips to her sister's bowed head. Peter swallowed, shuffled his feet, and nodded.

"Right," he mumbled, "right, she . . . she misses Mum."

Susan looked steadily across the room, her gaze accusing. Bill saw Peter flinch as if struck.

"No, Peter," said Susan, "that's not it." Then she looked back to their sister. "You go on," she said softly, and though she looked at Lucy, it was clearly Peter to whom she spoke. "If it's Edmund you're looking for, you'll find him at the bottom of the garden. He likes to sit there a lot, now. He says it helps him think."

"Look, Su," Peter began plaintively, then stopped. Susan was murmuring soft things to Lucy, and Lucy was still weeping. Peter shook his head, and tugged an agitated hand through his hair. "Right," he said, and left.

He shut the door behind him.

Lucy still wept, and Susan still spoke softly, but it was getting harder to hear. The hard lines of the room were softening; dropping away. Bill recognised what was happening, and he felt himself slipping back from the safety of the dream world. This time, though, he fought it. He knew all too well the feeling of removal and he clung, stubbornly trying to stay there. It might not have always been a happy place, but it was the place where his family was, and that alone was enough to make him desperate to linger. He was winning, too; he felt the warmth of sleep rising around him again, saw the room solidifying once more, and heard Susan's soft, gentle voice drawing closer. He was returning to the safe, sweet familiarity of all that sleeping encompassed . . .

And then he heard the voice. It was not a voice he had heard speak before; not exactly. But he knew that voice as surely as if he had held a thousand conversations with it over the course of a thousand years. In its richness and tone, he heard something he had always known; something he cleaved toward, aching to hear more of it. He felt the warmth of a gentle breath on his face, and heard a stern admonition.

"You yearn for what is past, as do they, but that place is not for you any longer. It was yours for a season, but what I give you now is yours for your lifetime. Your wife is waiting, and your children also. William Pevensie," with a terrible, wonderful echo of the roar that shook the world, "get up!"

O0O0O0O

Bill bolted upright in bed, his heart racing, his mind clearer than it had been in a lifetime. The planes overhead were firing on the beach . . . he heard the groans of a ship that had been fatally hit as it foundered and sank. Men were shouting, as they had been for days now, and . . . daylight filtered in.

Blinking, still not sure that this was what he was meant to do, Bill found his way down to the beach, heedless of the way the bullets from the German plans spat up sand along the shore, mindless of the bodies of the men around him. There was a boat, a modest little holiday steamer, bobbing close to hand in an English Channel that was the calmest it had ever been. The vessel, he saw, was remarkably like the one he and Maura had ridden on their honeymoon; it was remarkably like the one onto which he and Maura had taken the children for their holiday before the wars began.

Lucy had left her hat behind on that steamer.

Now it was crammed with soldiers in uniform, their faces haggard, their bodies wounded and their minds incomplete. Bill studied them in wonder; it did not occur to him that he must look just like them. Then a member of the steamer's crew spotted him, and shouted an unintelligible order to the pilot to wait a moment. He turned toward Bill, leaned over the side and held out his hand.

"You there, soldier!" he shouted over the hum of the planes and the shouts along the beach and in the water, "you, there, come on! We can manage one more."

Bill looked around. There was nobody within reach but he; had there been, he would have boosted the man up without a second thought. Instead, he stood alone. As if this were nothing more than another dream, he moved forward, wading into the water, walking out until the waves lapped at the highest part of his chest. Reaching up, he found his hand caught in the grip of the older man who stood on the ship above him.

"Steady now," the man cautioned, and with a strength disproportionate to his advanced years he hauled Bill up bodily from the waves, pulling him over the side onto the deck of the ship. "All right, Johnny," he hollered in the direction of the pilot house, "that's all she can hold. Take us home."

The ship responded to the coaxing of the unseen Johnny, moving forward through the waves, cutting cleanly through the water as she left the bloodied beach behind. Bill, sprawled on the deck in an inglorious puddle of mud and seawater, laboured to understand what had just happened. Almost as if he understood the young man's confusion, the man who had pulled Bill on board leaned over, beaming, and gave him a firm, friendly pat on the shoulder.

"That's the ticket, son, you just settle back there and catch your breath. We've been at this two days now and we haven't yet pulled a chap out who hasn't been worn out!"

And a heavy rug was produced, and wrapped around him, and Bill felt perfectly at his leisure to flop back onto the deck and stare up at the sky.

The planes still flew overhead, and he could hear the sounds of their attack all around him. He knew, in a very far and remote part of him, that men —many, many men. Thousands of men— were dying. But thousands more were being rescued. And when the planes weren't passing above the boat, the air was clear, the sky was blue . . . and the sun was shining.

O0O0O0O

**A.N.: **Your unasked-for history lesson follows; feel free to skip over it!

More than three hundred and thirty thousand men were rescued over the course of nine days. Nearly two hundred and forty rescue boats —out of more than eight hundred— were lost in the effort, as were the lives of many thousands of men; a great number of casualty reports, however, were suppressed or doctored for some time following the event in an effort to further boost British morale.

The Battle of Dunkirk is a contentious issue for many, since although it boosted British spirits it was terribly disheartening to the French, who felt abandoned by their allies. Some argue to this day that French capitulation to the Germans was directly connected to the evacuation at Dunkirk, while others point out that the Allies would have been over three hundred thousand troops short without it.

Another, only slightly smaller-scale evacuation involving the rescue of British, Polish, French and Canadian troops from Cherbourg and St Malo was also effected just over a week later, but this effort remains far less well known than the evacuation from Dunkirk. For all the mixed feelings still surrounding the event, the rescue at Dunkirk remains one of the most decisive —and certainly one of the earliest— turning points of the Second World War.

Up next: The Last Place.


	6. The Last Place

Epilogue:

The Last Place

O0O0O0O

Bill did not often talk about his time in the war, not the first time he came home, nor the second. To his surprise, Maura didn't ask him to; nor, when he saw them again, did the children. They were all too busy flying at him, flinging their arms around him and cheering that he was back, back, home again. And, returning their embraces with equally fierce ones of his own, he found his heart singing much the same song.

He did, at one point in between his first return and his second deployment, find himself alone with Peter; Peter did, at that point, look at his father in a way that would have struck Bill as unsuitably adult, had he not seen his own heart's conjecture of what a fine man his boy would one day be. In that moment Bill found he was somehow steeled for the question that his son asked him.

"Dad . . . is it difficult, to shoot a man?"

And Bill had said, quite simply, that it was if you made yourself think about it; that he trusted Peter would be a good enough person to make himself think about it and that, God willing, he would never have cause to force himself to not have to.

"We're going to win this one, Son," he said, "we're going to win it long before it becomes yours." Although he could not have said where the promise came from —Bill and Maura Pevensie didn't lie to their children, nor did they make empty promises— he knew that it was true, and he could see in Peter's face that he knew it, somehow, too. They were going to win it.

As much as anybody could win, in a war like this.

And win it they did, eventually; Bill was spared the return to France, being bogged down somewhere in the desert at the time, but he found that was all right, too. The heat of the sand was somehow familiar to him, and the coolness of the night air, such a welcome breath of relief after the scorching sun of the day, brought back to him that vivid moment he had dreamed, when his oldest daughter was trapped in a desert city but willing to sacrifice herself for the safety of others.

He wrote Susan a lengthy letter that night, looking out the flap of his tent over the expanse of glittering, moonlit sand. He described it to her with a fond familiarity that he did not question, even as his pencil flew over the paper. He knew, somehow, that she would understand what beauties he saw in this place that so many of his company loathed. He knew she would understand the respect in which he held the men who sat in the market place and discussed affairs of the day; he knew she would share the affection he felt for the scruffy children in the bazaar, poor wee things with their eyes gummed up with sickness, whining for coins and chocolate that he dispensed as freely as he could.

Susan would know what it was to love such a place; to feel a draw for a land and people that weren't one's own. How he knew it, he couldn't have said, but know it he did, and when he returned home, and found she had kept that letter and read it aloud to her family two dozen times, weeping over it each time she read it, he knew he had been right to send it.

After the war, it got even easier to be a family again. The post-war rationing was a daily complaint for many of their neighbours, and sometimes he would find Maura staring into the cupboard with a sort of desperate vexation that he ached to take away, but his chief source of delight through all of it was his children. Not once did they complain about having to go without favoured treats. Edmund, especially, he was proud of; indeed, the boy seemed to have gone off sweets altogether. Even when they could get hold of a bar of chocolate or a bit of sugar, Edmund turned down his share. When at last Bill drew his youngest son aside to ask about it, Edmund looked simply sheepish, and offered a careless shrug.

"Oh . . . I dunno, Dad," he said. "I just don't much care for sweets anymore. I do miss real meat, though!" And the impish, freckled grin had assured Bill that it was not merely a brave face —though Edmund could put these on at the worst of times, if he had to— but the plain and simple truth.

And somehow, he knew it was a good thing to hear.

Lucy, of course, was ever the delight of their household, but in a much different way than she had been before. Whereas before the war her simple, childish glee at everything had been cause to smile when nothing else had, she now devoted herself to evoking those smiles in everyone she met. Where once childish innocence had brightened a dreary room, now her simple determination to see everybody as happy as she had much the same effect with twice the brilliance.

If Maura broke one of the precious eggs it was still so hard to find, Lucy would rush to help clean up and offer to help finish the dish Maura had been preparing. If Bill found he was coming home more than usually glum at the end of the day, it would be Lucy who met him, not with ignorance of what caused his gloomy mood, but rather with a will to chase it away by telling him as many amusing stories as she could think of.

The stories themselves were a source of delight, too. They were stories that stirred a deep chord within him, tales of bravery and romance, of chivalrous knights and fierce battles, of clever little animals that could talk and solve problems, of charming Dwarfs, of magical lands . . . and Lions.

Looking back, he would admit he'd never been quite certain when the Lion entered the picture. Once he arrived, it seemed he had always been there, at the back of every story Lucy wove. Her sweet little face would take on a dreamy expression as she spoke, perched on the ottoman at his feet, her dimpled chin propped in chubby hands as she recounted the fantastic tales. And somehow, somewhere, there was always Him.

She never spoke his name. The Lion came in and out of the stories like a strong and silent secret, sometimes stopping to bestow words of wisdom on the protagonists but mostly choosing to watch from afar, weeping for his loved ones when they did not succeed, taking simple joy in them when they did. Lucy never named him, and Bill didn't think it would have been the same if she had. But there, behind every victory, every sorrow, every fear, was the mighty presence of a King who cared.

It wasn't long before Bill came to find the Lion as much of a comfort as it seemed that Lucy did, and it wasn't much longer after that —the day the children's holidays ended, and they went back to school— that he began to look for him at the back of every story, whether Lucy was telling it or not.

O0O0O0O

There is a certain warmth and satisfaction that parents feel when they have the chance to take a break from the weary busyness of their everyday lives and realise that, almost without them having seen it, their children are growing up. Bill and Maura Pevensie didn't get many such times in the precious years following the war, but every time they did, they treasured it, storing it up, and looking to it whenever things weren't as bright.

It was also true that sometimes seeing one's children grow up could be painful, too; Susan, especially, seemed to suffer from a dreadful bout of confusion as she grew older. Watching her push the others away, immersing herself in a world that he would not have chosen for anybody he loved, much less a daughter, Bill wrestled with a concern he found it difficult to voice even to his wife. When he did at last venture to express his fears, however, Maura had hugged him fiercely, and told him not to worry.

"Girls will do these things, darling," she told him affectionately. "Boys have their own types of silliness too, you know; you mustn't deny it. Susan will fuss over lipsticks and nylons, and in a few years Lucy will as well; Peter and Edmund will bury themselves in books or under the bonnet of a motorcar until something pretty walks by in _her_ nylons, and suddenly they'll be quite a pair of idiots for a time as well. You'll see, my dear; it will all come right if we give it time, keep on loving her always, and let the younger ones tell her what an ass she's making of herself."

It had seemed so sane, when she put it that way; so normal and practical. He had been able to see the right of it, then— that Susan, under it all, was still Susan, and she needed them more than ever; it would be the pettiest sort of person who could not look past what she seemed to be and see her for who she always had been, and who she yet was. So he told her how pretty she looked, and said the only thing prettier than his darling daughter with make-up on was his darling daughter without. She looked at him that evening with a sort of expression on her face that was suddenly very much her old self, with tears shining behind her eyes, and he remembered, unbidden, those dreams he had had all those years ago, when there had been nothing bright for him.

He remembered his children, grown and strong and lovely, when everybody was falling, broken, around him . . . a warm body that heaved with the breath of life even after it had been dead . . . and a roar that shook a world. His children, who had seen it all, had thrived and loved one another as he had loved them; as he loved them now.

He kissed his daughter's forehead, whispered that she must always remember how much they loved her, and told her to be home by ten.

And that night, as he joined Maura in bed and let his weary bones sink into the mattress, his wife slipping a welcoming hand across his chest, he found himself praying that Susan might find such dreams as he had known, and that she might find herself as he had known her; as he knew she could yet be.

It was just four days later that Everything Happened.

O0O0O0O

The day that Everything Happened was foggy, but the days leading up to it Bill would always remember with perfect clarity.

Just two mornings after the night he had seen Susan's eyes shimmer with tears, Peter and Edmund came blazing into the house at a speed reminiscent of their childhood. Bursting with whispered conversation they had quieted almost instantly on seeing him, and when he asked to what he owed this pleasure —with a pointed look at Peter, who ought to have been preparing for his mods— and so early in the morning, too, they both looked suspiciously awkward.

"Oh," said Peter, with an expression of such guilt that he really did look a little boy again, "Dad, please, don't ask. We won't be able to tell you. It's— it's a sort of project we're working on, you see."

"I see," Bill said, in a voice that meant he didn't. "You've woken your mother, you know, boys."

"Oh," this was Edmund, looking distraught. "We didn't mean to wake either of you, Dad."

"Yes," Bill studied them both, "I can see that." For both boys —young men, now, really— were dressed rather like workmen, right down to the heavy gloves they wore on their hands, and were clutching between them a grubby little bag that seemed to be the cause of all the whispering. "Well, now that you've woken your mother, see if you can't get your sister out of bed as well."

Relieved at not being pressured to explain their presence further, both of Bill's sons promised to see what they could do. Apparently, however, they went about it rather badly, because when Bill got home that night he found Susan in a fine temper and speaking only to Edmund and Maura. Deciding it was best left to Peter to explain in his own time what he could have said to his sister to put her in such a state, he instead asked after Lucy, and was assured she was in fine health.

"I am sorry we've missed her," Maura said. "Not that this will be much of a visit, anyhow, I'm afraid. We're going away for a few days, your father and I . . . some friends of ours have asked us to spend tomorrow with them at their home in Chatham, and then travel to Bristol with them the morning after. I do wish you had let us know you were coming, we'd have planned it some other way. Will you be here very long? Perhaps even here after we get back?"

"I . . . can't be sure," Peter said cautiously, and spared an uncertain glance for his brother. "We . . . may be. It's hard to say."

"Well," Bill said, "try, won't you, boys? We miss you."

So Peter nodded, and said they would try.

The next morning Maura had turned the keys over to Susan, warned her to be good to her brothers for as long as they were there, and he had hailed them a cab to the station, where they caught the train to Chatham. John and Alice were good friends, though not close ones, and the time away from home seemed to be just what he and Maura needed. They escaped the supervision of their host and hostess long enough to take a quiet stroll, just the two of them, and revel in the pleasure of not having anything pressing to discuss.

Only once did Maura bring up the topic of the children, wondering if he thought the boys would do all right with only Susan to watch over them. Bill considered the question, and confessed he really couldn't say for sure.

"I like to think," he decided, "that if it came down to it, they would have the tact to restrain themselves from shouting some sense into her, and that Susan would have the grace to keep from needling them to do it. Now," catching her hand, and tugging her into the pleasant seclusion of a small park, "do you think we might forget the children for the space of an afternoon?"

And Maura found, much to their mutual delight, that they could, indeed.

Everything from then on was a haze. The return to the house, the meal with John and Alice, the night spent in a comfortable bed and the early morning rise to catch the train to Bristol . . . it blurred, and was known to him only as something unimportant, compared to what happened next.

They had passed through London and were coming up to a smaller, country station. The train, Bill thought, was travelling fast. Too fast. He felt Maura shift behind him, and one slim, gloved hand reached out, hovering over his leg, as she sat forward.

"Bill—" she said, and there was a single note of alarm in her voice that made him turn, and look into her eyes.

Her little hat sat well back on her head that morning, leaving her face unshadowed. Her eyes, as always, were clear and green, and he saw they were also uncertain. She looked, in fact, as she had on their wedding day, and from the uncertainty they shared now, as he had on the day he promised to be hers until death, he drew his strength. He loved her. She knew it. That was enough.

And then there was a jolt, an awful, grinding, screeching jolt, and . . . sweetly, simply, nothing.

O0O0O0O

The haze through which Bill floated was somehow familiar to him. It took him a few minutes, however, to realise that it was much the same mist through which he had floated after his final visit to the dream world that he had loved so much and clung to for so long, when there had been nothing brighter or better for him to see.

This time, though, he was not alone; caught safe in his hand, her fingers locked through his, was the hand of his wife. When his feet touched ground again, and the mist lifted to reveal that they stood on a small, green hill beside the train tracks —or at least, beside a much prettier, cleaner, and nicer-smelling version of what looked very much like train tracks, except that there was no train on them— there she stood.

Maura was looking up at him, beaming, her face fresher, her golden hair somehow lighter and looser than it had been in years. The silver threads that had coloured it with such dignity were gone, and so were the lines of worry that had creased her face over the years. The lines of laughter, however, remained, and they crinkled up beautifully around her bottle-green eyes and she smiled at him; really smiled, the way she used to when they were just children, making promises to last forever.

He couldn't help himself; he just had to kiss her. She kissed him back, too, with marked enthusiasm, but when at last he broke the kiss, she blushed, and ducked her head, as she hadn't since they were those same children they once had been

"Bill," she said, and was slightly breathless as she said it, "oh, Bill, do turn around . . . there is a _lion_ watching us."

And so there was.

There is nothing I could say to you that would make you understand what Bill Pevensie felt and thought as he turned, and stood beside his wife to look on that Lion. It was not fear, you may be assured; nor was it joy, exactly, or even awe, but rather a deeper, more terrible, more glorious mixture of everything you have ever felt and wanted or feared to feel again, all mingled together in one great, sweeping breath. And the Lion that made him feel it all was looking at him with such love, and wisdom, and yes, even amusement, that he thought he must weep, except he was so perfectly, incandescently happy that weeping was no longer possible.

The Lion looked at him, and loved him, and Bill, looking on the Lion, found he loved it too; had loved it, in fact, for years. It was only on seeing its face that he realised how very long he had actually known it.

"You sent me my children," he said, and the proclamation was all the thanks he knew how to offer. The Lion inclined its great, shaggy head.

"I also," he said, and there in its rich, deep voice was the amusement, the love and the tenderness Bill had seen in its face, "sent you your wife." And the Lion looked on Maura with the same love it felt for Bill.

"Daughter," it said, and Maura made a small, happy sound, what you might call a sound of joyous recognition, "your children await you."

Then he looked again at Bill, and in that instant Bill realised that what had passed between them all those years ago were not simply dreams, pretty pictures sent to fill a frightened week of nights, but rather something that led him now to an understanding of all that he had seen, and all he would soon see again, only this time for real and forever. When the Lion spoke, Bill almost thought he saw it smile.

"My son. Welcome home."

O0O0O0O

**A.N.:** And lo, it ends! Only, if you have read _The Last Battle_, you will know of course that it is really just beginning. And so I thought it fitting that, as it ends, something else should begin! I have therefore begun what I believe will be a slightly longer fic than this, going by how I've plotted it. It's called _Kingdoms Come_, and the first chapter will quite shortly (as in, sometime today!) be posted and available for your reading pleasure, if you should choose to take a peek!

Thanks are offered to everybody who took the time to read, review, and let me know what they thought, no matter what that was!


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